The Historians' History of the World 06

Augustus disbanded the unruly multitudes who had crowded into the service of the great military chieftains of the civil wars. He strained every nerve to gorge them with the largesses for which alone they would forego the periodical plunder of unoffending cities, in which their leaders had been compelled to indulge them. But while they were reposing upon their estates, or rioting with their profuse gratuities, he speedily remodelled his military establishment, and equipped a force of twenty-five legions for the defence of the empire. He fixed a reasonable scale of pay for every armed man in his service, from the rank and file of the cohorts to the “lieutenant of the emperor with proconsular rank.” The proconsular armies were maintained and paid by the machinery of the proconsular government in the provinces; so that the emperor, without being ostensibly the paymaster of the legions, did in fact, through his lieutenants, hold the purse upon which they depended. We have seen how incompetent we are to state the salary of the provincial governor; nor can we estimate the pay of the various grades of officers. We only know that the simple legionary received one denarius daily, a sum which may equal eightpence half-penny of English money. A part of this sum was stopped for his arms, implements, and accoutrements; but he retained perhaps a larger proportion of it than the pocket money of the British private, and the simple luxuries of the wine shop were cheap and accessible. Marriage was strongly discouraged, and generally forbidden in the Roman ranks, and the soldier’s allowance was perhaps chiefly expended in averting the blows of the centurion’s vine-staff, and buying occasional exemption from the fatigues of drill and camp duty. If we are justified in drawing an inference from the proportion observed in a military largess in the time of Cæsar, we may conjecture that the centurion received double, and the tribunes four times, the pay of the legionary.

The full complement of each of the twenty-five legions was 6100 foot, and 726 horse; and this continued with occasional variations, to be the strength of the legion for a period of four hundred years. The cohorts were ten in number; and the first, to which the defence of the eagle and the emperor’s image was consigned, was nearly double the strength of the others. These brigades became permanently attached to their distant quarters: in later times the same three legions occupied the province of Britain for two or more centuries. They were recruited ordinarily from the countries beyond Italy; in the first instance, from the Roman citizens in the provinces. But even while the rights of citizenship were extended, this restriction was gradually relaxed; and instead of being the requisite qualification for admission to the ranks, the freedom of the city was often bestowed on the veteran upon his discharge. Numerous battalions of auxiliaries, differently arrayed and equipped from the legionaries themselves, continued to be levied throughout the most warlike dependencies of the empire, and attached to each legionary division. It is generally computed that this force equalled in number that of the legions themselves, and thus we arrive at a total of 340,000 men, for the entire armies of the Roman Empire, exclusive of the battalions maintained in Rome itself.